Deathgate

DEATHGATE 28 What makes a young gentile man create a memorial to honour the victims of the Holocaust, an event that happened when his own grandfather was a young man? It wasn’t his war, his politics, even his culture. He is a voice from the Antipodes, a world away from Europe…in fact the very distance that attracted European refugees to Australia especially after World War II despite stringent immigration quotas and the country’s slight taint of anti- Jewish sentiment, part of a generalized xenophobia linked to the rise of Australian nationalism. 2 In 2015 Dan Elborne had an idea that prompted a visit to Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the site of mass destruction, of genocide, of humiliation, brutality and starvation. He saw the ruins of the gas chambers, he saw the railway, the memorials. He was shocked by the reality of impossible inhumanity. He brooded about what he had seen, about the invasive, overwhelming horror, the aura of atrocity that continues to be recalled and processed by the many pilgrims to the site and who, by their presence, validate its memorialisation. Elborne was driven to make a statement and so “Deathgate” began. “Death Gate” was the name given to the entrance that led into the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camps and through which the cattle trains passed carrying their human cargo. It was a portal of no return. 1.3 million souls were incarcerated. 200,000 survived. Dan Elborne’s installation consists of two parallel beds of handmade ceramic stones. One is 110 metres long and contains 1.1 million stones, one for each of those who died in the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camps. The other runs for 20 metres and contains 200,000 stones, one for each of those who survived. The rows are approximately ten centimetres deep and are 2.4 metres wide, the same width as the stones covering and surrounding the line leading into the concentration camp. The installation and its documentation honour those human beings: those who endured and those who were sacrificed. Memorializing such a period in history condones nothing. It confronts the horror and demands remembrance. The Shoah, the Holocaust was a malevolent atrocity totally devoid of anything human, except of course, for the victims. It was a depraved act that must never be forgotten. As time distances history, and those who survived into old age begin to pass away, guilt and blame may become redistributed but the shock remains: re-lived in literature, film, memorials, and artworks. It is not about dwelling on the past, but retaining an awareness of how the perfidy of human nature can be manipulated to the corruption of humanity. Those who died must be remembered and continue to be acknowledged. This act of remembrance becomes even more crucial today as we seem to be living again in a world of fear, uncertainty and an awkward complacency: a breeding ground for the political right that opposes social democracy and the rights of the individual. REMEMBER Sandy Pottinger “They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time” – Rainer Maria Rilke 1 Continued overleaf